Gratitude: The Startling Impact of Giving & Receiving Appreciation

By James R. Lucas

This book offers you an opportunity to radically change your life for the better, with only a very little investment of time. Sound like a miracle? Well, the change is a miracle. There's no other investment in the world that provides this large a return on this small an investment. This book will show you how to make that investment, and will help you see the profuse rewards of those outsized returns on your life and the lives of those around you.

Author James Lucas opens the book with three chapters that may startle you, even as you recognize that what he is saying is absolutely true. He writes first of all that we need to be watchful, because genuine gratitude is easy to dismiss, devalue and lose. Then he shakes off a hundred things we believe to be true, when he writes without equivocation that no one owes us anything. He then leads us into a place that is the opposite of wishful thinking, what he calls "the art of being amazed by everything." And he means everything.

James devotes the next 5 chapters of this book of pilgrimage to walking through the giving of genuine gratitude. He shows you what it does for others, and what it can do for you. He starts with the "easy one," being thankful for what people do for us. But then he broadens our view exponentially. This view includes: being thankful for what people are doing even if they're not doing it for us; making people feel seen and known; special gratitude for the most special ones in our lives; the unique concept of "flashback" gratefulness; and the hope-filled idea of second-chance gratitude.

He doesn't stop there. In the following 5 chapters he walks us through the receiving (or not receiving) of gratitude. As before, he starts with the "easy one," responding to gratitude from others. He then challenges us to be grateful for some things that don't easily pop into our minds when we want to be thankful. This includes gratefulness for what we didn't get (both good and bad); and even more in the thankfulness distance, being grateful for the bad things that kept us from the worse things. And then he gets down to the really harsh realities of ingratitude.

The author pulls no punches on the problem of ingratitude. He talks about the best ways to respond to others when they show ingratitude for us or for what we're doing, which can leave us lost at sea. And then he takes on the toughest issue in the world of gratitude – what we should do when other people return bad for our good, not just showing unearned ingratitude, but hitting us hard with a soul-shattering blow that can be deeply disturbing, or can even wipe us out.

In the final 3 chapters, James closes this book with hope, if we choose to grasp and hold on for dear life to this elusive thing called "gratitude." He shows us how gratitude can be grown dramatically from an action into a life. He talks in depth about the problems – he calls them "diseases" – that genuine gratitude can heal. And finally, he shows us that displaying and sharing gratitude isn't a full-time job or vocation, but rather an expansive way of living that can be expressed (and built) every day, in the smallest and easiest of interactions.

The author is certain that living out this way of life will touch your family and friends, will transform your world, and will impact your own soul in ways you cannot imagine until after you take the first resolute step and go for it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667839738

Book preview

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Gratitude

The Startling impact of Giving

& Receiving Appreciation

In a World that Mostly Doesn’t Care

¹

James R. Lucas

To share with the author how this book has helped and impacted your life,

please send your thoughts to Maryl at [e-mail].

The author loves to hear from you!

Copyright 2022 by James R. Lucas. All rights reserved.

Published April 2022 by American Books LLC. First Edition.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy,

recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author,

except for brief quotation in critical reviews, books or articles.

Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book, and for complying with copyright

laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing it in any form without permission.

___________________________________________

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lucas, James R.

Gratitude: The Startling Impact of Giving & Receiving Appreciation/ James R. Lucas

1st edition

ISBN: 978-1-66783-972-1(paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-66783-973-8 (ebook)

Subjects: Gratitude | Thankfulness | Appreciation |

Virtues | Culture | Relationships |Ingratitude

Version_1

Grateful for You

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Since this is a book about gratitude, you won’t be surprised to learn that in its pages I am going to tell you about a lot of things for which I am grateful.

However, there is someone who has made substantial contributions to this work.

That someone is Maryl Donna Janson, to whom this book is dedicated. I could try to tell you how much I appreciate her, but I know my words would fail to express it as richly as I feel it. As with every book I have written, she has been an unwavering inspiration and support.

As always, she has also added immeasurably to the content, suggesting other aspects of this magical thing called gratitude, and providing ideas that have enriched the book significantly.

I have my own saying for her: I’m a writer, but I’m righter with you.

William Arthur Ward said, Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. So Ms. Maryl, as I’ve said above, I’m immensely grateful for you and your wonderful support.

And this book is the present that I’ve wrapped as well as I can, and I’m giving to you.

A WORD ABOUT EXAMPLES & ANECDOTES

To illustrate the ideas in this book, I found it necessary to use quite a few examples and anecdotes from my own life. Although ideas and words can be helpful, illustrations can make those ideas come alive.

I was hesitant, for a number of reasons. For starters, I am far from being a perfect example of living the grateful life, and I’ve certainly let many opportunities slip through my fingers.

I didn’t use these examples and anecdotes so that you could copy me, but rather so you would have some good jumping-off points for practicing this breathtaking wonder called gratitude. I fully expect you to personalize these offerings from my life, and to add to them as the world presents itself to you.

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but gratitude in action might beat them both.

A NOTE ABOUT NEW WORDS AND PHRASES

Sometimes I search for a word and just can’t find the right one (even using an unabridged thesaurus). So occasionally I might make up a new word or phrase, and you can be sure it’s not a misprint (it’s called a neologism). For instance, changing the second-to-last sentence above:

I fully expect you to you-ize these offerings from my life, and to add to them as the world presents itself to you.

You can insert a name here as well: Please feel free to Dylan-ize or Michaela-ize what I’m saying to you. I hope you enjoy these little diversions that make me a neoligist (remarkably, a word I had to make up: a neologism is a new word made up by a neologist, which is itself a new word).

A COMMENT ABOUT REFERENCES TO OTHER WRITINGS

You will find quotes in this book from a wide range of people. As I researched what others had to say about gratitude, I was amazed at how much this subject occupies the minds of so many great leaders and thinkers and writers. The people I quoted could be very useful and interesting for you to look into more deeply, to see what they’ve written or to hear what they’ve said.

As it seemed valuable for you, I give references in the endnotes to excellent writers and books that can help you go deeper and get richer in so many ways that count. Also in the endnotes, I provide some biblical references to aid Christian/Catholic and other interested readers.

Please note that a reference may be just that – you may have to look it up, at least for context. I hope you will be able to feel grateful for this homework!

Table of Contents

THE TWO-WAY PATH

CHAPTER 1 - The Elusiveness Of Real Gratitude

CHAPTER 2 - No One Owes Us Anything

CHAPTER 3 - The Art Of Being Amazed By Everything

THE GIVING SIDE

CHAPTER 4 - Being Thankful For What

Others Do For Us

CHAPTER 5 - Being Thankful For What

Others Just Do

CHAPTER 6 - Making People Feel Seen

CHAPTER 7 - Gratefulness To The One

CHAPTER 8 - Flashback And Second-

Chance Gratefulness

THE RECEIVING SIDE

CHAPTER 9 - Responding To Gratitude From Others

CHAPTER 10 - Appreciation For What We Didn’t Get

CHAPTER 11 - Gratitude For The Bad

That Kept Us From The Worse

CHAPTER 12 - When Someone Is Ungrateful

To Us Or For Us

CHAPTER 13 - When Someone Returns

Their Bad For Our Good

THE RESULTS OF GRATITUDE

CHAPTER 14 - The Relentless Momentum

Of Ongoing Gratitude

CHAPTER 15 - All The Diseases That Gratitude Cures

CHAPTER 16 - Understanding That There

Are No Little Things

ENDNOTES

THE TWO-

WAY PATH

You know, if you were to ask me to sum

my life up in one word, gratitude.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I lie in bed at night, after ending my prayers with the words

‚Ich danke dir für all das Gute und Liebe und Schöne‘

(Thank you, God, for all that is good and dear and beautiful).

Anne Frank

The first of these two died fighting against the horror that was Nazi Germany.

The second of these two died hiding from the horror that was Nazi Germany.

The first was imprisoned, and then murdered just days before the end of the war. The other was found, and then murdered months later at one of the death camps. A 39-year-old pastor and theologian, Protestant through and through. A 15-year-old girl and diarist, Jewish through and through. Both taken out before their time by monstrous human evil.

And yet somehow, incredibly – almost beyond believability – they were both grateful human beings.

How is that even possible?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison cell was a most unpleasant place. The Nazi culture surrounding him was hideous and vile, destroying everything that had been even remotely decent in Germany and Europe. Arrested for participating in plans to remove Hitler from power, isolated and mistreated, he somehow found a way to appreciate his life and even where he had ended up.

Waiting day after day for 18 months to be executed, he didn’t let his life stop with that terrible waiting. He was thankful for God’s grace – not cheap grace, which he spoke against, but costly grace.

Anne Frank’s last home was a most agreeable place on a pleasant Amsterdam street, but where she had to hide inside that home was most unpleasant. I have been to that street, to that house, to the place where she was hiding behind the wall. It’s hard to imagine how a young girl – how anyone – wouldn’t go out of their minds in that confined space and with that unrelenting dread. Arrested for the crime of being born a Jew, she still found a way to be grateful for so very many things.

Waiting to be caught, she filled her time with her writing, which was in some way made richer by her unimaginable experience.

The lessons? If these two could be grateful, I can be grateful.² If these two could be grateful, you can be grateful. In truth, if these two could be grateful, anyone can be grateful.

In this first section of the book, we will set the gratitude table together.

As soon as most of us hear the word gratitude, we instinctively sense that it’s pretty much always a good thing. It’s a very special character trait. But it is a lot more than just a great virtue, although it is indeed that.

Gratitude is a way of perceiving the world and people that surround us. Simply put, grateful people look at life in a totally different way than the ungrateful do. It’s a viewpoint that is not only better for our society, but better for us as individuals. Much better. Immeasurably better.

Gratitude is one of those rare and fabulous approaches to life that has no downside. Unlike so many attributes that can (with the best of intentions) be taken to an extreme – generosity to a fault, responsibility to a fault, compassion to a fault, even forgiveness to a fault with an unrepentant abuser – there is no such thing as gratitude to a fault. Nobody has ever been too grateful.

We’ll see together how gratitude is a pathway to spiritual, mental, and emotional health.

It took me a long time to realize that gratitude isn’t just a nice virtue with some related happy feelings. Gratitude is a force. It really, truly, actually changes us from the inside out. It makes us better people, which is good news for us and (perhaps) even better news for the people around us.

On the other hand, we’ll also see together how ingratitude shrivels our souls. It can lead to broken relationships, crushed dreams, and a host of other personal disasters.

Ingratitude isn’t some one-off event, like forgetting to thank the server at a restaurant, or not remembering to thank someone who sent you a gift. Ingratitude left unchecked becomes a way of life. It turns you into someone who people can simply describe as ungrateful.

Ingratitude is also a force, one that corrodes us from the inside out. Ingratitude becomes you. It colors the way you view, and react to, everything.

But allow me to give you some good news: Gratitude is a learned response.

People aren’t born grateful. In fact, if we’re being honest, we’d be forced to admit that newborns and little children can be the most demanding and least appreciative of all the human beings on earth. Cute, even adorable, but largely ungrateful. In babythink³, they’re often wondering What have you done for me lately? while saying, Whaaaaaaa, usually loudly, to force you into doing it.

If anything, we could argue from experience that ingratitude is actually the norm for our beloved little ones, and that children have to learn to be grateful, just like they have to learn how to walk and talk and learn what bathrooms are for. Sadly, no one was ever born eager to be grateful.

But here’s some more good news: Ingratitude really isn’t wired into our DNA. We can outgrow that early, natural surge of me first and me only to become grateful people in a host of ways. The only real antidote to ingratitude is to develop a spirit of gratefulness, and that is within reach of every person on the planet.

Even if our environment is drowning in ingratitude, we don’t have to go down with the ship. Even if we have a list of things in our lives that practically demand ingratitude, we can choose not to let that list define us. Even if we have been a miserably ungrateful person for years – perhaps even our whole lives – we can start our turnaround right now.

It isn’t like a diet, where we might have to wait for months (or forever) to lose that extra weight. This very moment, right here, right now, we can take the first step toward being a grateful human being.

But there is a challenge. Gratitude is as real as anything in human life, but it’s a bit of a ghost. It can be easy to value but hard to find. So we’ll begin in Chapter 1 by looking at the elusiveness of gratitude, and what we might do to lay our hearts on it. Gratitude is far better than gold, but to possess it we have to really want it – and sometimes, to dig for it. Deep. Hard. Long.

Then in the next two chapters we’ll talk about two specific, able-to-be-chosen-by-anyone attitudes that prepare the ground for gratitude.

The first of these choose-able attitudes is something that simply isn’t obvious, although it’s totally true: No one owes us anything.

Nothing. Not a bloody thing. The only thing we all have to do is die. Everything else is optional.

But as we’ll see in Chapter 2, accepting the idea that no one owes us anything is a wonderfully freeing approach to life. It’s a positive mindset that opens an inner door to a million possibilities.

What do I mean? Well, to owe means that either we’ve borrowed something from someone, or we’ve somehow created an obligation. If that’s true, then shouldn’t I say that people do owe other people various things? Of course they do.

But when we say No one owes us anything, we’re not talking about a formal or physical agreement or document. If we borrowed something, of course we need to give it back or pay it back. If we’ve chosen to create an obligation, of course we should fulfill it.

So what do I mean? I’m making two points here.

The first point is that no one needs to loan us anything in the first place. No one needs to offer or create a real obligation in the first place. Creating bonds, legal and otherwise, is a voluntary act of a free moral agent. Not creating bonds is also a voluntary act of a free moral agent.

No one needs to marry us, partner with us, have children, raise those children well (or at all), get a degree, start that business, hire us, take that job, buy that house, pay those bills, or join that religious or charitable or social organization.

The list of things we don’t have to do – of loans and obligations and debts that we don’t have to assume – is longer than a receipt from CVS.

The other point I’m making here is that no one can be forced to follow through on a debt or obligation that they’ve agreed to take on. If they borrow, of course they should repay, but many people don’t. If they create an obligation, of course they should do their part, but countless people go out of their way to avoid fulfilling obligations.

Meaning? Even after a debt or obligation is created, in a relational and pragmatic sense people still don’t owe us anything. We can and should take our own debts and obligations seriously,⁴ even as we refuse to let others who choose to welch on debts and obligations drag us down.

The second of the choose-able attitudes (along with no one owes us anything) seems as though it should be obvious to us if we can still fog a mirror, but in real life it’s frustratingly hard to see. The problem is that it can get lost in the activities and weeds of life. There’s just too much stuff clogging up our vision and our paths. The result? Taking things for granted (sadly) becomes the default position.

But happily, there’s an antidote at hand: Choosing to believe – to acknowledge, really – that everything is amazing. Everything. Life. Breath. Nature. Flora. Fauna. Sunsets. Microbiomes. Love. Generosity. Commitment. You.

As we’ll see in Chapter 3, being amazed by everything is a heart-set⁵ that opens an outer door to another million possibilities.

As I write this the moon is full, but it is also fully amazing. Here we have a mini-planet that is rotating on its own axis and revolving around the earth, but we only ever see one side of it. Why? Because it somehow rotates and revolves in exactly the same amount of time. What? Are you kidding?

I don’t think it’s possible for most of us to picture this astronomical wonder in our minds. It is so crazily awesome that we have to see an animation of it on Rumble or YouTube to understand this inexplicable precision (you should take a minute and find a simulation of it as soon as you can). We get to see the result hundreds of nights a year.

Whether you think it was designed and created that way, or somehow just happened, the one thing that all of us can agree on is this: This one-sided moon thing is absolutely amazing.⁶

You might think you don’t have a lot to be grateful for, or maybe anything. I understand. I have personally hit some very low points in my life, so I know the weight of that sense of emptiness, hopelessness, or loneliness. I know it can be incredibly hard just to get out of bed. Or even to think about getting out of bed.

And if life and people and circumstances have done you dirty, it can add immeasurably to that weight. How can you be grateful in a world like that? Well, you can. In fact, for your own sake you have to. The alternative to choosing gratitude is to let that dirt bury you.

But take heart. This is a book about gratitude, and it is a real, living, breathing force. It has nothing to do with some fluffy let’s all just party and be happy and have a few laughs response to the hardness of life. Gratitude is a rooted, gritty, relentless, life-changing, acquired attitude.

Even if you’re down on the ground and don’t know how to get up, right here, right now, you can be grateful that you’re still alive. That you’re still in the game, and the game isn’t over yet. That you have the ability to make an enormous adjustment to your mindset and heart-set that can impact everything. That you’re still in the fight and have a shot at winning. And that it ain’t over till it’s over.⁷

You can be grateful that you can change almost anything about your thinking, your attitudes, your actions, and your responses to life’s hardnesses⁸ – both small and large - starting today, starting now.

Here we go.

CHAPTER 1

The Elusiveness Of Real Gratitude

In every class of society, gratitude is the rarest

of all human virtues.

Wilkie Collins

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity

for taking things for granted.

Aldous Huxley

Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart,

it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.

A.A. Milne

A long life has taught me that there are really only a few attitudes that can lead us to rare actions, the kind of actions that yield outsized gains for ourselves and those around us.

One of those few is gratitude.

It’s really easy to get soft and sentimental when we talk about gratitude. It seems like something that everyone should experience a lot, feel a lot, show a lot, receive a lot. What’s the possible downside to being grateful?

But although it can have drippings that are soft and sentimental, the core is something else – something deeper, something powerful, something extremely tangible, and yet sadly something highly fragile.

I lost my brother and very, very close friend John in April 2020. I’ve lost other close family and friends, but for a host of reasons his death hit me like a ton of bricks. Because of the pandemic, we couldn’t even visit him in the hospital.

We’re more than half Irish, and he was a classic Irishman – big, broad, strong, hardworking, responsible, happy, funny, loving, all-in, family first, generous to a fault. And yes, he liked a few cold b…lemonades. As a young man, his nickname was The Bear, but he could just as easily have been called, The Teddy Bear. He became one of the finest people I’ve ever known.

I was the oldest of 5 children, and I went off to college about the same time that our Dad’s World War II PTSD and tropical diseases finally swallowed him up, leading our Mom to separate from him. In the chaos, John moved into the storage room underneath the family room at the back of the house. As a 12-year-old I had helped my Dad build that addition, including the underground store room.

This storage room was just concrete block and dark, and was very uninviting, but for John it had the advantage of being out of sight (and sound and mind). He brought in some bean-bag chairs and other odds and ends. He ran a heating duct from the furnace in the basement through the former outside window that we had left in place.

We all know that there’s no place like home, but there was really no place like this home. To call it ugly would be an insult to ugly.

This former dumping ground for junk had a separate outside entrance. All manner of questionable characters visited John at all hours. Some of them seemed to become part of the furniture, as the storage room became their permanent home. It turns out they weren’t there to play board games or drink protein shakes.

They called this hole in the wall The Pad. I think that was bum-speak for A really grubby place where no one will bother us while we’re busily wasting our lives.

I was graduated from college and working in another city when Mom finally had enough. She called me and said, I can’t take it. It’s terrible. And it’s setting a really bad example for Dan, Tim, and Patty [my younger siblings]. He needs to move out, but I can’t do it. I need you to take care of this.

Being the oldest child always has some advantages. This wasn’t one of them.

So I called John on a Monday. I told him I would be driving into St. Louis from Kansas City on Saturday, and that I was going to take him anywhere he wanted to go. I said that he could pack himself, or we could do it together. I also told him he couldn’t go back home. Pretty much ever.

I told Mom that if I did his, she couldn’t slip John money or food. That was a tough one, because she was 100% Irish and John was her little boy – even though he came in at 6’3 and about 240 pounds. I had to give her the ultimate firstborn-son threat to get her to follow through: If you help him out or let him move back in, I’ll never visit here again. She agreed, in great part because she told me that John had gotten my Irish up." We all knew what that meant.

Yes, my threat to her was tough, but it was effective. Would I have followed through with her on my threat about staying away? Glad I never had to find out, because the answer was almost certainly No. A fundamental rule of life is that you can’t ignore an Irish mother forever. Or for very long.

By this time John was a lot bigger and stronger than I was, causing me to think of options if he wouldn’t cooperate. The only one that I could come up with involved a bazooka.

But when I arrived, John had all of his stuff boxed up and ready to go. He was sitting quietly on the front porch, patiently waiting for me. We greeted each other cordially and were mostly silent after that. We loaded his stuff into my car together. I asked John where he wanted to go. He said, very matter-of-factly, the Baden Hotel.

Now, if you’ve seen Psycho, you’ll understand how bad the Baden Hotel was when I tell you that it was three steps down from the Bates Motel. It was one of the seediest buildings in one of the seediest places in the entire city of St. Louis. It was a filthy, run-down, paint-peeling place where no self-respecting rat would willingly live (but a place that a lot of rats lacking a sense of self-respect did call home).

But the Baden Hotel had one advantage: It was really, really cheap. John stayed there for a while, got a real job (in part so he could get out of there), and over time turned into one of the most responsible people I’ve ever known. He never looked back, never tried to move back home, never complained.

The next time I saw him, I was still just his big brother and friend. Amazing. This says more about him that it does about me.

But I always wondered what kind of black mark that put in his mind with regard to our relationship. I’ve known many people who took dramatic action with a family member and that was the end of the relationship – at least the relationship part.

It was many years later before I found out what John really thought about this gut-wrenching experience and time.

A big group of family members were sitting around, talking and laughing about the old days. The story I just shared with you came up, and (watching John out of the corner of my eye) I told the story in Twainian terms with a lot of added detail. Many hadn’t heard the story and were shocked, but everyone hooted with those wonderful can’t control it belly laughs as I described John looking around the Baden Hotel lobby.

After everyone settled down, John looked straight at me from across the room and said something that shot right into my heart: Jim, I want you to know that doing what you did is the best thing anyone has ever done for me. Ever. I’d trust you with my life. Thank you, Bro.

A rock-hard life experience, and all these years later he was grateful? What?! How was that even possible? Holy cannoli!

I must tell you, I never saw that coming. A right cross or left hook, maybe. A few insults, perhaps. But not gratefulness. I could live for a hundred years on those 31 words. Whatever I gave John, he gave me back times a hundred.⁹

Now, I’m not telling you this so you’ll think I was a terrific big brother who did all the right things, because I wasn’t and I didn’t. I’m telling you this to highlight the odd, out-of-the ordinary, impactful nature of genuine gratitude.

Gratitude is so often right there, ready to be voiced, geared up to break out into the open. But it can slip right through our fingers if we’re not careful, if we’re not payng attention.

It can be so deep it can take years or decades for it to finally find articulation. And as I learned from John, it can be expressed in return for words and actions that on the surface might seem as though they should stir up anger and bitterness instead. John astounded me with his gratitude.

I’ve discovered that gratitude is like that – able to surprise, amaze, and occasionally take your breath away. However, if you take this journey with me I won’t promise that your life will be transformed. I won’t have to promise this, because transformation is what gratitude do.

So just exactly what is this thing called gratitude?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as a strong feeling of appreciation to someone or something for what the person has done to help you.

The Oxford Dictionary gets a bit closer to the mark, defining it as "the quality of being thankful; readiness